Television Without Frontiers

TELEVISION WITHOUT FRONTIERS (2019/2020)

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"Television Without Frontiers" is a film and a documentary performance that investigates the meaning of “common ground” in contemporary European context. Striving for a format located between performance and film, often found in popular television talk shows, the production took place in the studio of Swedish public service television (SVT), in Gothenburg.

 

The work centers around a 1982 project titled “Eurikon”, originally an attempt to establish a transnational public service network, initiated by EBU (the European Broadcast Union). In a similar spirit "Television Without Frontiers" brings together a number of TV and media personalities from across Europe and beyond, all of them engaged in multilingual conversations. The performance also consists of a chorus of interpreters, an orchestra, an audience, a giant turtle which is assembled and inflated, archival footage, a hypnotist, and an ice cream vendor who provides a mythic back story. In an exhilarating atmosphere that shifts between the past and the present, the actual and the fictive, full of unexpected twists and turns, this work investigates how Eurikon might be used as a model to find out what happened to the vision of post-national community.

 

Eurikon was born of an attempt to free the media landscape of national boundaries and to expand the idea of public serivce, setting its sight upon a unified European context. Today’s reality of polarized media and politics is far removed from these ideas and this worldview. Rather than continuing the search for “common ground,” the contemporary political project of Europe seems to be caught in the split between globalist and nationalist drives. And while the question of truth has become an urgent topic in debates about media, the real issue seems to be about trust.

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"Television Without Frontiers" was produced by The Public Art Agency in Sweden.

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Artist/Director: Andjeas Ejiksson

Creative Producer: Fredrik Egerstrand

Curator: Edi Muka

Cinematographer: Martin Mineur

Costume design: Ellen Utterström

Sound Mixer: Christian Gyllensten

Graphic Design & Animation: Denise Hedström

 

Cast: Sylive Caspar, Ahmed EL-Ghandour, Jacek Poniedziałek, Ash Sarkar, Sylvana Simons, Yankho Kamwendo, Jonathan Royle, Kjell Wilhelmsen, Lucas Carlsson, Marta Oldenburg, Louise Bjurholm, Per-Magnus Heinemann, Yasmina Kebaier-Dombrovicki, Cecilia Klintebäck, Artur Sedlar, Anne Verbeke, Mattias Bylund, Per Strandberg, Michael Engström, Miko Rezler